Blind Lake (24 page)

Mirror Girl was bothering her again. Mirror Girl wanted her to look at the distant cooling towers of Eyeball Alley.

But what was so interesting about that?

“Tess?” Edie said. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Sorry,” Tess said automatically.

“God, you’re so weird,” Edie said.

All that morning, Tessa’s attention was drawn to the towers. She could see them from the window of the classroom, off across the snowbound empty fields. Crows swirled through the sky. They lived here even in winter. Lately they had multiplied, or so it seemed to Tess, perhaps because they were fattening on the garbage tip west of town. But they didn’t perch on the tall, tapered cooling towers. The cooling towers were there to conduct away excess heat from the Eye down below. Parts of the Eye needed to be kept very cold, almost as cold as it was possible to be, what Mr. Fleischer had once called “near absolute zero.” Tess rolled that phrase around in her mind. Absolute zero. It made her think of a bitter, windless night. One of those nights so still and cold your boots squeaked against the snow. Absolute zero made it easier to see the stars.

Mirror Girl found these thoughts intensely interesting.

Mr. Fleischer called on her a couple of times. Tess was able to answer his science question (it was Isaac Newton who had discovered the laws of motion), but later, during English, she heard nothing of the question itself, only her name as Mr. Fleischer called it out—“Anyone? Tessa?”

They had been reading
David Copperfield
. Tess had finished reading the book last week. She tried to imagine what Mr. Fleischer might have asked, but her mind was a blank. She stared at the top of her desk, hoping he’d call on someone else. The seconds ticked by uneasily and Tess felt the weight of Mr. Fleischer’s disappointment. She wrapped a curl of hair around her forefinger.

Annoyingly, Edie Jerundt was waving her hand in the air.

“Edie?” Mr. Fleischer said at last.

“The
Industrial Revolution
,” Edie said triumphantly.

“Right, it was called the Industrial Revolution…”

Tess returned her attention to the window.

At the end of the morning she told Mr. Fleischer she was going home for lunch. He looked surprised. “That’s a bit of a hike, isn’t it, Tess?”

Yes, but she had hoped Mr. Fleischer didn’t know that. “My dad is picking me up.” A complete and total lie. She was surprised at how easily it came out of her mouth.

“Special occasion?”

Tess shrugged.

Once she was outside, wrapped in her winter jacket (but lacking Edie’s two sweaters), she realized she wasn’t going home and that she wouldn’t be back for the after-lunch session of school. Mirror Girl had brought her here, and Mirror Girl had her own plans for the afternoon.

Since the end of the sandstorm crisis the Eye had performed smoothly and without the slightest glitch.

It was almost unnerving, Charlie Grogan thought. He had walked through Control once this morning and everyone had been relaxed—as much as anyone could relax since the beginning of the lockdown. People actually smiled. Volts and amps were in the safe zone, temperature was stable, all the data was squeaky clean, and even the landscape through which the Subject continued to trudge seemed sunlit and more or less amicable. Charlie, feeling useless in his office, watched his monitor for a while. Subject was visibly worn. His integument was dull and pitted, his yellow coxcomb drooped like a tattered flag. But he walked steadily and with apparent determination through the roadless wilderness. The land was flat and desolate but there was an irregularity on the forward horizon, mountain peaks, a glint of high-altitude snow.

The Subject made slow progress. Sort of like a snail on an empty sidewalk. Bored, and without any maintenance duties for once, Charlie skipped lunch and wandered down to the glass-walled gallery above the O/BEC platens.

The gallery was mainly for show. It was a place you could bring a visiting congressman or European head of state, back before the siege. The gallery overlooked the platens from a secure height. Absent tourists, the gallery was usually empty; Charlie often came here to be alone.

He leaned into the inch-thick inner glass wall and gazed down three stories to the O/BEC platens. Those humbling objects. Thinking themselves into interstellar space. You weren’t supposed to say so, but they
did
think, that was undeniable, even if (like the theorists) you insisted they merely “explored a finite but immense quantum phase-space of exponentially increasing complexity.” Yeah, merely that. The O/BECs pulled images out of the stars and dreamed them onto a grid of pixels by “exploring quantum phase-space”—word salad, Charlie thought. Show me the wires. What was it actually grabbing, and how? Nobody could say.

What is an angel? That which dances on the head of a pin. What dances on the head of a pin? An angel, of course.

These O/BECs were only the most central part of the vast machine that supported them. All told, the Eye occupied an immense amount of square footage. Standing here in the middle of it, Charlie imagined he could feel the cold ferocity of its thoughts. He closed his eyes. Dream me an explanation.

But the only thing he could see behind his eyelids was a memory of the Subject, the Subject lost in the hinterlands of his dry old planet. Funny how clear the daydream seemed, invested with a clarity at least as vivid as the direct feed on his office monitor. As if he were walking in the Subject’s footsteps. The sunlight was warm and a shade or two bluer than earthly sunlight, but the sky itself was white, charged with dust. A gentle wind kicked up miniature whirlwinds that traveled yards across these alkali-stained flats before they sighed out of existence.

Strange. Charlie leaned into the glass wall and imagined himself reaching out to the Subject. Surely even the O/BECs had never translated an image as distilled, as supernaturally pure, as this. He could, if he chose, count every bump on the Subject’s pebbled skin. He could hear the metronomic steps of the Subject’s dusty, elephantine feet; and he could see the trail the Subject left behind him, two punctuated parallel lines scribed into the granular material of the desert floor. He could smell the air: it smelled like hot rock, like mica-laden granite exposed to the noonday sun.

He imagined putting his hand on the Subject’s shoulder, or at least that sloping bit of gristle behind the Subject’s head that passed for a shoulder. How would it feel? Not leathery but hard, Charlie thought, each gooseflesh bump like a buried knuckle, some of them prickly with stiff white hairs. Subject’s coxcomb, flush with blood, most likely served to adjust his core temperature to the heat; and if I touched it, Charlie thought, it would feel moist and flexible, like cactus flesh…

Subject stopped abruptly and turned as if startled. Charlie found himself gazing into the Subject’s blank white billiard-ball eyes and thought,
Oh, shit
!

He opened his own eyes wide and reeled back from the glass. Here in the O/BEC gallery. Home safe. He blinked away what could only have been a dream.

“Are you all right?”

Startled a second time, Charlie turned and saw a young girl standing behind him. She wore a winter jacket haphazardly buttoned, one side of the collar poking up past her chin. She twirled a strand of her curly dark hair around her finger.

She looked familiar. He said, “Aren’t you Marguerite Hauser’s daughter?”

The girl frowned, then nodded.

Charlie’s first impulse was to call Security, but the girl—Tess, he recalled, was her name—seemed timid and he was reluctant to frighten her. Instead he asked, “Is your mom or dad here?”

She shook her head no.

“No? Who let you in?”

“Nobody.”

“Do you have a pass card?”

“No.”

“Didn’t the guards stop you?”

“I came in when no one was looking.”

“That’s some trick.” In fact it should have been impossible. But here she was, goggle-eyed and obviously unsure of herself. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Not really.”

“What brings you here, then, Tess?”

“I wanted to see it.” She gestured at the O/BEC array.

For a long moment he was afraid she would ask him how it worked.

“You know,” Charlie said, “you’re really not supposed to be wandering around all by yourself. How about you come to my office and I’ll give your mom a call.”

“My mom?”

“Yeah, your mom.”

The girl appeared to think it over.

“Okay,” she said.

Tess sat in his office looking at some glossy brochures he scared up for her while he buzzed Marguerite’s pocket server. She was obviously surprised to hear from him and her first question was about the Subject—had something interesting happened?

Depends how you look at it, Charlie thought. He couldn’t shake that dream of the Subject from his mind. Eyeball to eyeball. It had seemed ridiculously real.

But he didn’t tell her about that. “I don’t want to worry you, Marguerite, but your daughter’s here.”

“Tess? Here? Here
where
?”

“At the Eye.”

“She’s supposed to be in school. What’s she doing out there?”

“She’s not actually doing much of anything, but she did manage to sneak past the guards and wander down to the O/BEC gallery.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Wish I was.”

“How is that possible?”

“Good question.”

“So—is she in big trouble, Charlie?”

“She’s here in my office, and I don’t see the need to make a big deal out of this. But you might want to drive out and pick her up.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Marguerite said.

Tess was unresponsive while Charlie walked her out to the parking lot. She didn’t seem to want to talk, and she certainly didn’t seem to want to talk about how she had gotten into the complex. Before long her mom zoomed into the visitor lot and Tess climbed gratefully into the rear seat of the car.

“Do we need to talk about this?” Marguerite asked.

“Maybe later,” Charlie said.

On his way back to his office he took a high-priority call from Tabby Menkowitz in Security. “Hey, Charlie,” she said. “How’s Boomer these days?”

“An old hound but healthy. What’s up, Tab?”

“Well, I got a big alert on my nonrecognition software. When I checked the cameras there you were, escorting a little kid out of the building.”

“She’s a team leader’s kid. Playing hooky and curious about the Alley.”

“What’d you do, smuggle her in in a rucksack? Because we caught her when she was leaving but not when she arrived.”

“Yeah, well, I wondered about that myself. She said she just sneaked in when nobody was looking.”

“We have full coverage on our security cameras, Charlie. They’re
always
looking.”

“I guess it’s a mystery, then. We don’t have to panic over it, do we?”

“It’s not like anybody’s leaving town, but I’d really, really like to know where she found a back door. That’s absolutely important information.”

“Tabby, we’re under siege—surely this can wait until the big problems get solved.”

“This
is
a big problem. Are you asking me to just let it ride?”

“I’m advising you that she’s an eleven-year-old kid. Look into it by all means, but let’s not drag her into an official investigation.”

“You just found her down in the gallery?”

“She snuck up on me.”

“That’s pretty deep, Charlie. That’s a big hole.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Tabby was silent for a moment. Charlie let the silence play out, left it to her to make the next move. She said, “You know this girl?”

“I know her mom. Want another datum? Her dad is Ray Scutter.”

“Is there anything
else
you know? I ask because you’re the one who took her out of the building without notifying me.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, but it kind of took me by surprise. Really, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest.”

“Uh-huh. You understand, I
do
have to look into this.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“But I guess I don’t have to process the paperwork right away.”

“Thanks, Tabby.”

“You have absolutely nothing to thank me for. Honest.”

“I’ll say hi to Boomer for you.”

“Give him a breath mint for me. That barbecue last summer, he was grossing everybody out.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

Alone, Charlie finally allowed himself to think about what had happened this afternoon. To mull it over in his mind. Except—well, what the fuck
had
happened? He’d been daydreaming in the O/BEC gallery and then the girl wandered in. Was he supposed to be able to tease some meaning out of that?

Maybe he’d give Marguerite a call after work.

In the meantime he had another question. He wasn’t sure he wanted it answered, but it would plague him like a headache if he didn’t ask.

So he took a breath and called his friend Murtaza in Image Acquisition. The call went through at once. “Must be quiet down there.”

“Yup,” Murtaza said. “Smooth like silk.”

“You got time to do me a little favor?”

“Maybe. I’m on break at three.”

“Won’t take that long. I just need you to look at the clocked image for the last hour or so, especially around—” He estimated. “Say, between twelve forty-five and one.”

“Look at it for what?”

“Any unusual behavior.”

“You’re out of luck. He’s just walking over the landscape. It’s like watching paint dry.”

“Something small. Something gestural.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Okay, well, easy enough.” Charlie waited while Murtaza defined the time segment and ran a look-find app, zipping through the afternoon’s stored imagery. The scan took less than a minute. “Nothing,” Murtaza said. “Told you so.”

That was a relief. “You’re sure?”

“Today, my friend, the Subject is as predictable as clockwork. He didn’t even stop to take a leak.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, feeling a little idiotic.